Why Climate Change will never be stopped
Jeanwah
Posts: 6,363
This is an excellent article about the fossil fuel industry and how they literally stop any chance of American recovery via American Politics. I've met the author, who lives nearby, and he's been involved in the workings of Big Coal for years, and has written books on the topic, as well as this article for Rolling Stone. So he's not a scientist, yet knows the ins and outs of Coal mining, and is not a politician. He calls it as he sees it from researching the science and finding out what's going on in Washington.
As the World Burns
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/st ... orld_burns
How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most aggressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming
JEFF GOODELL Posted Jan 06, 2010 8:15 AM
This was supposed to be the transformative moment on global warming, the tipping point when America proved to the world that capitalism has a conscience, that we take the fate of the planet seriously. According to the script, Congress would pass a landmark bill committing the U.S. to deep cuts in carbon emissions. President Obama would then arrive in Copenhagen for the international climate summit, armed with the moral and political capital he needed to challenge the rest of the world to do the same. After all, wasn't this the kind of bold move the Norwegians were anticipating when they awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize?
As we now know, it didn't work out that way. Obama arrived in Copenhagen last month without any legislation committing the U.S. to reduce carbon pollution. Instead of reaching agreement on how to stop cooking the planet, the summit devolved into bickering over who bears the most blame for turning up the heat. The world once again missed an opportunity to avert disaster — and the delay is likely to have deadly consequences. In recent years, we have moved from talking about the possibility of climate change to watching it unfold before our eyes. The Arctic is melting, wildfires are turning into infernos, warm-weather insects are devouring forests, droughts are getting longer and more lethal. And the more we learn about climate change, the more it becomes apparent how enormous the risks are. Just a few years ago, researchers estimated that sea levels would likely rise 17 inches by 2100. Now they believe it could be three feet or more — a cataclysmic shift that would doom many of the world's cities, including London and New Orleans, and create tens of millions of climate refugees.
Our collective response to the emerging catastrophe verges on suicidal. World leaders have been talking about tackling climate change for nearly 20 years now — yet carbon emissions keep going up and up. "We are in a race against time," says Rep. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington who has fought for sharp reductions in planet-warming pollution. "Mother Nature isn't sitting around waiting for us to get our political act together." In fact, our failure to confront global warming is more than simply political incompetence. Over the past year, the corporations and special interests most responsible for climate change waged an all-out war to prevent Congress from cracking down on carbon pollution in time for Copenhagen. The oil and coal industries deployed an unprecedented army of lobbyists, spent millions on misleading studies and engaged in outright deception to derail climate legislation. "It was the most aggressive and corrupt lobbying campaign I've ever seen," says Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic consultant.
By preventing meaningful action in Copenhagen, the battle to kill the climate bill provided the world's biggest polluters with a lucrative victory — one that comes at the rest of the world's expense. "In the long term, the fossil-fuel industry is going to lose this war," says Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But in the short term, they are doing everything they can to delay the revolution. For them, what this fight is really about is buying precious time to maximize profits from carbon sources. It's really no more complicated than that."
For the nation's dirtiest carbon polluters, the election of President Obama was not good news. Big-energy interests had a real pal in George W. Bush, but during the 2008 campaign, Obama put the fate of the planet above the fate of the fossil-fuel industry. America's oil addiction, he declared, is "one of the greatest challenges of our generation."
Even before the election was over, those who had the candidate's ear were urging Obama to move quickly to enact climate legislation. In a lengthy memo to the campaign, an experienced veteran of the climate wars advised that the incoming president would "be able to claim a mandate to lead boldly" on carbon pollution. The memo recommended that Obama take immediate steps to design a plan of attack by setting up a SWAT team of key advisers and congressional leaders. "The president must seize the debate," the memo warned, "before others hijack or derail it."
Obama's first moves on the climate front were encouraging. He appointed Carol Browner, head of the EPA under Bill Clinton and a close confidante of Al Gore, as "climate czar," and he named Steven Chu, a respected scientist who understood the need to confront global warming, as energy secretary. A month after taking office, he also moved to implement a 2007 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court empowering the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The threat to Big Coal and Big Oil was implicit: If energy interests balked at working with Congress to create a new system to curb carbon pollution, the administration would simply unleash federal regulators. "If Congress does nothing," warned Sen. Barbara Boxer, who was spearheading climate legislation as chair of the Senate environment committee, "we will be watching EPA do our job."
Obama also had something else going for him: The man he had defeated for president was one of the chief backers of a bipartisan plan to rein in climate-warming pollution. It was widely assumed that John McCain, who had co-sponsored a plan known as "cap and trade" with Democrat Joe Lieberman back in 2003, would be a crucial ally in selling tough, effective carbon limits to his GOP colleagues in the Senate. At root, cap-and-trade is a fairly simple idea: The government sets an economywide cap on carbon-dioxide emissions by issuing a fixed number of permits for carbon pollution each year. Those permits can then be traded on the open market, enabling polluters to decide for themselves whether it's cheaper to cut emissions or buy permits. The same approach worked spectacularly well in curbing acid rain two decades ago, reducing sulfur dioxide pollution far faster and cheaper than anyone had anticipated. Celebrated as one of the great success stories of the environmental movement, the program has spawned a number of imitators, including a European market for carbon emissions that got under way in 2005, as well as a statewide carbon-trading system under development in California. That's not to say there aren't problems with cap-and-trade; tracking CO2 from millions of sources poses a daunting challenge, and granting too many loopholes known as "carbon offsets" could render the entire system meaningless. But the plan enjoyed wide support among environmentalists, economists and business leaders as the fastest, cheapest and most politically viable way to cut climate-warming pollution. "The most important thing," Chu told Rolling Stone last spring, "is to get the architecture in place and to begin to move in a new direction."
Any plans Obama had to move quickly on climate legislation, however, were derailed by the economic disaster he inherited from the Bush administration. As the new president scrambled to bail out Wall Street, keep GM afloat and win approval for a $787 billion plan to stimulate the economy (including $80 billion for clean energy and green jobs), reining in carbon pollution dropped lower and lower on the list of pressing demands. "In the midst of the worst recession in a generation," says Jason Grumet, who served as Obama's top energy adviser during the campaign, "climate change isn't what leaps to mind for the average voter." When it came time to set his legislative agenda, Obama decided to make health care, rather than global warming, his top priority. "Health care has a populist feel to it," explains a campaign insider. "It's much more the kind of meat-and-potatoes issue that Obama feels comfortable with."
The decision to put health care first infuriated some activists, who feared the president would be unable to win climate legislation in time for Copenhagen. "Why not push a climate bill as Green Stimulus, Part Two?" asks one top environmental economist. But leaders in the House had already decided to push through a climate bill on their own — even without strong public support from the White House. Taking the lead on the measure was Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Ed Markey, head of the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming. As one climate activist close to the administration steamed, "What good is health care on a dead planet?"
Waxman and Markey's bill — the American Clean Energy and Security Act — was hardly a silver bullet aimed at the heart of Big Coal and Big Oil. It set wimpy near-term goals for reducing carbon (only 20 percent by 2020) and included far too many offsets (2 billion tons a year). All in all, it was nowhere near as tough as it needed to be to cut emissions quickly and stave off the most extreme consequences of climate change. But it did contain strong measures to improve energy efficiency, and it represented a crucial first step in creating the framework for a low-carbon economy. "The legislation now on the table isn't the bill we'd ideally want, but it's the bill we can get — and it's vastly better than no bill at all," observed Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize laureate.
If the bill pulled its punches on global warming, that's because it was based in large part on a business-friendly blueprint that had been laid out in January, only a few days before Obama was sworn in as president. Assembled by the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of leading environmental groups and major companies like GE and ConocoPhillips, the plan called for reducing carbon pollution by as little as 14 percent before 2020 — while continuing to allow conventional coal plants to be built. The industry-driven plan prompted the National Wildlife Federation to pull out of USCAP, calling for action that "measures up to what scientists say is needed."
Still, even in its diluted form, the House bill alarmed many coal and oil companies. Foreseeing a showdown over climate change, the energy industry had been busy packing Capitol Hill with lobbyists. By last year, according to the Center for Public Integrity, the number of lobbyists devoted to climate change had soared by more than fivefold since 2003, to a total of 2,810 — or five lobbyists for every lawmaker in Washington. "I had no idea this many lobbyists even existed in Washington," says former senator Tim Wirth, now head of the United Nations Foundation. Only 138 of the lobbyists were pushing for alternative energy — the rest were heavily weighted toward the old fossil-fuel mafia, most of whom oppose tough carbon caps. The most aggressive foes were coal polluters like Peabody Energy and the Southern Company, an Atlanta-based utility known for its prowess on Capitol Hill. "They're kneecap breakers," says one congressional staffer.
For Southern and Peabody, as well as for oil giants like ExxonMobil, the Waxman-Markey bill meant war: If they could kill it, they could not only stall action on climate at home, they could also wreck the chances for an international deal in Copenhagen. These companies had spent decades funding studies that undermined the science of global warming, using tactics honed by the tobacco industry to sow doubt and confusion in hopes of staving off regulation. Now, they switched their line of attack. Rather than arguing that global warming isn't real, they tried to shift the fear from climate change to the specter of a massive government intervention. The climate bill, they argued, was nothing more than a national energy tax that would cause energy prices to skyrocket and destroy American jobs. As evidence, they pointed to a study by the Heritage Foundation, long a purveyor of junk science favored by the energy industry. (The conservative think tank has received at least $500,000 from ExxonMobil and $3 million from funders with ties to Koch Industries, a major oil-refining company.) Not surprisingly, the Heritage study predicted economic disaster if the climate bill were signed into law: Electricity rates would jump by 90 percent, gas prices would increase by 74 percent, the average energy bill would rise by $1,500 a year, and as many as 2.5 million jobs would disappear.
This, of course, was complete bullshit. The most credible analysis of the bill, from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, found that the measure would cost most families no more than $175 a year — the equivalent of "about a postage stamp a day," Markey says. But the Heritage Foundation is nothing if not a big, well-greased disinformation machine. "We noticed that every time a constituent came in to talk to us about the bill, they would be quoting the same numbers," says one congressional staffer. "We knew they were a lie, but they were everywhere."
Rest of the article is here. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/st ... ld_burns/4
As the World Burns
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/st ... orld_burns
How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most aggressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming
JEFF GOODELL Posted Jan 06, 2010 8:15 AM
This was supposed to be the transformative moment on global warming, the tipping point when America proved to the world that capitalism has a conscience, that we take the fate of the planet seriously. According to the script, Congress would pass a landmark bill committing the U.S. to deep cuts in carbon emissions. President Obama would then arrive in Copenhagen for the international climate summit, armed with the moral and political capital he needed to challenge the rest of the world to do the same. After all, wasn't this the kind of bold move the Norwegians were anticipating when they awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize?
As we now know, it didn't work out that way. Obama arrived in Copenhagen last month without any legislation committing the U.S. to reduce carbon pollution. Instead of reaching agreement on how to stop cooking the planet, the summit devolved into bickering over who bears the most blame for turning up the heat. The world once again missed an opportunity to avert disaster — and the delay is likely to have deadly consequences. In recent years, we have moved from talking about the possibility of climate change to watching it unfold before our eyes. The Arctic is melting, wildfires are turning into infernos, warm-weather insects are devouring forests, droughts are getting longer and more lethal. And the more we learn about climate change, the more it becomes apparent how enormous the risks are. Just a few years ago, researchers estimated that sea levels would likely rise 17 inches by 2100. Now they believe it could be three feet or more — a cataclysmic shift that would doom many of the world's cities, including London and New Orleans, and create tens of millions of climate refugees.
Our collective response to the emerging catastrophe verges on suicidal. World leaders have been talking about tackling climate change for nearly 20 years now — yet carbon emissions keep going up and up. "We are in a race against time," says Rep. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington who has fought for sharp reductions in planet-warming pollution. "Mother Nature isn't sitting around waiting for us to get our political act together." In fact, our failure to confront global warming is more than simply political incompetence. Over the past year, the corporations and special interests most responsible for climate change waged an all-out war to prevent Congress from cracking down on carbon pollution in time for Copenhagen. The oil and coal industries deployed an unprecedented army of lobbyists, spent millions on misleading studies and engaged in outright deception to derail climate legislation. "It was the most aggressive and corrupt lobbying campaign I've ever seen," says Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic consultant.
By preventing meaningful action in Copenhagen, the battle to kill the climate bill provided the world's biggest polluters with a lucrative victory — one that comes at the rest of the world's expense. "In the long term, the fossil-fuel industry is going to lose this war," says Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But in the short term, they are doing everything they can to delay the revolution. For them, what this fight is really about is buying precious time to maximize profits from carbon sources. It's really no more complicated than that."
For the nation's dirtiest carbon polluters, the election of President Obama was not good news. Big-energy interests had a real pal in George W. Bush, but during the 2008 campaign, Obama put the fate of the planet above the fate of the fossil-fuel industry. America's oil addiction, he declared, is "one of the greatest challenges of our generation."
Even before the election was over, those who had the candidate's ear were urging Obama to move quickly to enact climate legislation. In a lengthy memo to the campaign, an experienced veteran of the climate wars advised that the incoming president would "be able to claim a mandate to lead boldly" on carbon pollution. The memo recommended that Obama take immediate steps to design a plan of attack by setting up a SWAT team of key advisers and congressional leaders. "The president must seize the debate," the memo warned, "before others hijack or derail it."
Obama's first moves on the climate front were encouraging. He appointed Carol Browner, head of the EPA under Bill Clinton and a close confidante of Al Gore, as "climate czar," and he named Steven Chu, a respected scientist who understood the need to confront global warming, as energy secretary. A month after taking office, he also moved to implement a 2007 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court empowering the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The threat to Big Coal and Big Oil was implicit: If energy interests balked at working with Congress to create a new system to curb carbon pollution, the administration would simply unleash federal regulators. "If Congress does nothing," warned Sen. Barbara Boxer, who was spearheading climate legislation as chair of the Senate environment committee, "we will be watching EPA do our job."
Obama also had something else going for him: The man he had defeated for president was one of the chief backers of a bipartisan plan to rein in climate-warming pollution. It was widely assumed that John McCain, who had co-sponsored a plan known as "cap and trade" with Democrat Joe Lieberman back in 2003, would be a crucial ally in selling tough, effective carbon limits to his GOP colleagues in the Senate. At root, cap-and-trade is a fairly simple idea: The government sets an economywide cap on carbon-dioxide emissions by issuing a fixed number of permits for carbon pollution each year. Those permits can then be traded on the open market, enabling polluters to decide for themselves whether it's cheaper to cut emissions or buy permits. The same approach worked spectacularly well in curbing acid rain two decades ago, reducing sulfur dioxide pollution far faster and cheaper than anyone had anticipated. Celebrated as one of the great success stories of the environmental movement, the program has spawned a number of imitators, including a European market for carbon emissions that got under way in 2005, as well as a statewide carbon-trading system under development in California. That's not to say there aren't problems with cap-and-trade; tracking CO2 from millions of sources poses a daunting challenge, and granting too many loopholes known as "carbon offsets" could render the entire system meaningless. But the plan enjoyed wide support among environmentalists, economists and business leaders as the fastest, cheapest and most politically viable way to cut climate-warming pollution. "The most important thing," Chu told Rolling Stone last spring, "is to get the architecture in place and to begin to move in a new direction."
Any plans Obama had to move quickly on climate legislation, however, were derailed by the economic disaster he inherited from the Bush administration. As the new president scrambled to bail out Wall Street, keep GM afloat and win approval for a $787 billion plan to stimulate the economy (including $80 billion for clean energy and green jobs), reining in carbon pollution dropped lower and lower on the list of pressing demands. "In the midst of the worst recession in a generation," says Jason Grumet, who served as Obama's top energy adviser during the campaign, "climate change isn't what leaps to mind for the average voter." When it came time to set his legislative agenda, Obama decided to make health care, rather than global warming, his top priority. "Health care has a populist feel to it," explains a campaign insider. "It's much more the kind of meat-and-potatoes issue that Obama feels comfortable with."
The decision to put health care first infuriated some activists, who feared the president would be unable to win climate legislation in time for Copenhagen. "Why not push a climate bill as Green Stimulus, Part Two?" asks one top environmental economist. But leaders in the House had already decided to push through a climate bill on their own — even without strong public support from the White House. Taking the lead on the measure was Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Ed Markey, head of the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming. As one climate activist close to the administration steamed, "What good is health care on a dead planet?"
Waxman and Markey's bill — the American Clean Energy and Security Act — was hardly a silver bullet aimed at the heart of Big Coal and Big Oil. It set wimpy near-term goals for reducing carbon (only 20 percent by 2020) and included far too many offsets (2 billion tons a year). All in all, it was nowhere near as tough as it needed to be to cut emissions quickly and stave off the most extreme consequences of climate change. But it did contain strong measures to improve energy efficiency, and it represented a crucial first step in creating the framework for a low-carbon economy. "The legislation now on the table isn't the bill we'd ideally want, but it's the bill we can get — and it's vastly better than no bill at all," observed Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize laureate.
If the bill pulled its punches on global warming, that's because it was based in large part on a business-friendly blueprint that had been laid out in January, only a few days before Obama was sworn in as president. Assembled by the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of leading environmental groups and major companies like GE and ConocoPhillips, the plan called for reducing carbon pollution by as little as 14 percent before 2020 — while continuing to allow conventional coal plants to be built. The industry-driven plan prompted the National Wildlife Federation to pull out of USCAP, calling for action that "measures up to what scientists say is needed."
Still, even in its diluted form, the House bill alarmed many coal and oil companies. Foreseeing a showdown over climate change, the energy industry had been busy packing Capitol Hill with lobbyists. By last year, according to the Center for Public Integrity, the number of lobbyists devoted to climate change had soared by more than fivefold since 2003, to a total of 2,810 — or five lobbyists for every lawmaker in Washington. "I had no idea this many lobbyists even existed in Washington," says former senator Tim Wirth, now head of the United Nations Foundation. Only 138 of the lobbyists were pushing for alternative energy — the rest were heavily weighted toward the old fossil-fuel mafia, most of whom oppose tough carbon caps. The most aggressive foes were coal polluters like Peabody Energy and the Southern Company, an Atlanta-based utility known for its prowess on Capitol Hill. "They're kneecap breakers," says one congressional staffer.
For Southern and Peabody, as well as for oil giants like ExxonMobil, the Waxman-Markey bill meant war: If they could kill it, they could not only stall action on climate at home, they could also wreck the chances for an international deal in Copenhagen. These companies had spent decades funding studies that undermined the science of global warming, using tactics honed by the tobacco industry to sow doubt and confusion in hopes of staving off regulation. Now, they switched their line of attack. Rather than arguing that global warming isn't real, they tried to shift the fear from climate change to the specter of a massive government intervention. The climate bill, they argued, was nothing more than a national energy tax that would cause energy prices to skyrocket and destroy American jobs. As evidence, they pointed to a study by the Heritage Foundation, long a purveyor of junk science favored by the energy industry. (The conservative think tank has received at least $500,000 from ExxonMobil and $3 million from funders with ties to Koch Industries, a major oil-refining company.) Not surprisingly, the Heritage study predicted economic disaster if the climate bill were signed into law: Electricity rates would jump by 90 percent, gas prices would increase by 74 percent, the average energy bill would rise by $1,500 a year, and as many as 2.5 million jobs would disappear.
This, of course, was complete bullshit. The most credible analysis of the bill, from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, found that the measure would cost most families no more than $175 a year — the equivalent of "about a postage stamp a day," Markey says. But the Heritage Foundation is nothing if not a big, well-greased disinformation machine. "We noticed that every time a constituent came in to talk to us about the bill, they would be quoting the same numbers," says one congressional staffer. "We knew they were a lie, but they were everywhere."
Rest of the article is here. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/st ... ld_burns/4
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Comments
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/enviro ... ticle.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/colu ... andal.html
Keep burying that head.
The glaciers aren't melting! Global temperatures haven't been rising steadily for decades!
This is just a hippie fad! Drill baby drill!
:roll:
although lobbyists and big corporations do play a major role ... most people do realize the impacts of climate change and still don't do anything about it ...
Nail hits the head.
Corporations worship the almighty dollar... people within the corporations usually know about the pollultion/environment problems but maximizing profitability is more important. There are usually clear trade offs and the dollar will always win.
Actually the article is all about the relationship between the fossil fuel industries and Washington politicians...and the lobbyists in between. It's really a good (but long) article, but positively points out that there will never be a climate bill passed as long as money talks. A lot of lying is being done on the GOP's part when talking about climate change, simply because Big Oil and Big Coal are paying them to.
But I do agree with you that it's up to the people to know better and to start acting.
I have long railed against the role of lobbyists and the outright lies corporations are allowed to spew ... and although they are still mainly to blame - people should know better by now ... how many died in landslides in calfornia several weeks ago? ... and that's in a place that is best suited to handle it ... now, put those landslides in bangladesh or somewhere and we have disasters - but no one really cares ...